This invention relates to a pack of playing cards.
As is known, there exist many different kinds of playing card packs, each having distinctive peculiarities. It is nonetheless possible to pinpoint some typical features shared by most of the card packs known heretofore.
A first, important feature generally exhibited by prior card packs is that each of the cards in the pack has on one side an obverse face or front carrying either symbols or pictures or numbers peculiar to a game, and on the opposite side, a reverse face or back carrying a generic pattern unrelated to the game. Each card may, therefore, be told from the others in any one pack by just said obverse face, the reverse face being invariably the same for all cards to prevent players from singling out the cards in the hands of the other players, or in a deck when the cards are laid down overturned.
Moreover, the reverse faces of cards from different packs usually are not identified with any specific symbols and may just have, for example, different colors or different decorative patterns.
Another common feature of conventional playing card packs is the following: different packs of one kind, or intended for playing a specific game, or having one type of symbols on their marked card faces, all have their cards with the same or like symbols, in the various packs, for combination into sets of equal numerical consistency. This in order to leave the range of playable games unaltered when the card packs are changed. Accordingly, packs of one kind not only comprise an equal number of cards but also one and the same numerical distribution of like cards.
A further feature is that, with each pack, the various sets of cards have, at least in a majority of cases, the same numerical consistency in relation to the number of the cards comprising them. Thus, a like numerical distribution also occurs in most cases among the different cards in one pack.
The presence of one or more of the general features outlined above results in conventional playing card packs being unsuitable for chance games, where it is important that drawing a given number of cards randomly from a deck yields results which be difficult to foretell and much varied, with a wide range of drawing probabilities for the various cards. In fact, with currently used cards, it is a relatively easy matter to tell which cards remain to be played, based upon those already played. Furthermore, nearly all the cards in each pack, or in the various packs, have initially the same probability of being drawn.
Thus, it has been difficult to play varied and really appealing games where these are based on random drawing of conventional pack cards.
It should be further noted that conventional playing cards carry in many cases, on their marked faces, combinations of numbers and pictures which are relatively complex or at least more appropriate for a pondered and scrutinizing game procedure than an appealing and swift one, or game of chance, which may be played in quite an expedite fashion and require instantaneous visualization of cards.
These relatively complex combinations of numbers and pictures also result in that any advertising representations are difficult to add to such cards if they are not to distract the player.
Furthermore, the value of such advertising representations is of little consequence with known games because of their role in a game being quite immaterial.